In high availability nonstop production environments concurrent recovery, repair and extensive testing of replacement memory such as DIMMS (dual in-line memory module) memory is highly desirable. Replacement memory DIMMs are prone to early life failures, contamination during shipment or installation. Improper installation processes often cause replacement DIMMs to fail. Replacement DIMMs frequently fail shortly after the memory is returned to the production use and under stress.
Conventional testing of replaced memory DIMMS typically involve background read only memory scrubbing techniques to clean up single bit errors and detect multiple bit errors in the system installation environment. Also in conventional testing methodologies that perform a write test, the entire productive system is disabled to accommodate the write test. These two methods and others like it either require a different system installation environment than the production environment or disruption of the production services or applications.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have a system and method that would allow a production system to have memory concurrently installed and stressed and verified in the actual production environment without affecting the production environment. This would allow the customer and the IT supplier to more confidently return repaired components after failure to production and verify replacement component.